What’s the most important belief you hold where the only evidence for it is 1) people’s answers to survey questions and/or 2) people’s behavior in contrived laboratory experiments?
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what evidence do you have that anybody actually forms beliefs on such a basis? I think people mostly form beliefs based on magical thinking, and then decorate them with survey results or lab results. It's a kind of performance art.
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I’m asking about the beliefs - I don’t know what kind of answers I’m going to get yet, or I wouldn’t ask!
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you’re right that trying to do mental gymnastics to imagine a biography for a belief is part of the exercise
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Hmm... maybe beliefs like a survey on vegetarian/vegan self identification or pure sensory tests like response speed to flashing images (I assume we're talking mostly of social psych type stuff, not general beliefs like speed of light)
More shaky stuff, I don't think belief is even the right word for how I hold certain propositions. I "entertain" them seriously is more like it. Like say ego depletion or power poses. Having them falsified does not disturb me the way discovering that the earth is flat would.
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oh man once I watched someone find out in her late 20s that her childhood family dog didn’t really go to live on a farm
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